Chapter 6
One year ago. Chicago. Christmas.
It's eleven in the morning on December twenty-third when Erin walks into the office with the look of someone carrying bad news, someone who's been rehearsing how to deliver it since she got out of bed, in the car on the way in, even in the elevator.
"Tell me," Eleanor says without looking up from the documents in front of her.
Erin stops short. Eight years in, and she still hasn't figured out how her boss anticipates everything and, sometimes, reads her mind.
"Tonight's event," Erin says, pausing for a beat. "Hartman confirmed he'll be there."
Eleanor looks up then, and her eyes are pure venom.
Hartman. Senator Hartman, the man who's spent two years blocking every initiative Eleanor has tried to push through the committee, the same man who gave an interview last week suggesting—with the cowardly elegance of someone who never says anything directly—that Eleanor Montgomery didn't have the experience to run for the Senate.
If Hartman is at tonight's event, her absence reads as weakness.
And in politics, the unintended messages are the dangerous ones.
"Who else confirmed?"
Erin walks over and hands her the iPad. Eleanor scans it in about two seconds.
"I need to not be at that event," Eleanor says, and she says it calmly, because she's the kind of person who believes problems have solutions if you apply enough intelligence. "Find me a way out, Erin. Anything. Illness, scheduling conflict, family emergency."
"I've been trying since last night, when Hartman's confirmation came in," Erin says. "I talked to the party's coordination team. Attendance is marked mandatory from national leadership, Eleanor. It's not a suggestion."
Eleanor clicks her tongue, an involuntary reaction she can't suppress.
"Everything has a solution," she says, biting off each word.
"I called Patterson."
Eleanor goes still.
Patterson is the head of national leadership. The fact that Erin called him without being asked means Erin already knew, before she walked into this office, that the conversation was going to end right here.
"And?"
"He said your absence tonight would read as a statement of internal positioning at the worst possible moment.
" Erin holds Eleanor's gaze without blinking, because in eight years she's learned that what the congresswoman tolerates least is having things softened for her.
"His exact words were that if you don't show up tonight, you're handing Hartman his excuses on a silver platter. "
The silence that follows lasts four seconds. Four seconds in which Eleanor Montgomery feels her body start to boil and has to clench her fists to anchor herself to the ground.
"Get out," Eleanor says.
"Eleanor—"
"Get out, Erin." This time she says it looking her in the eyes. "Thank you."
Erin nods, leaves, and pulls the door shut carefully, like she's trying not to wake a monster that's been sleeping for decades.
Eleanor rises slowly from her chair, circles the desk, and walks to the window.
The lake is gray today, the sky too, all of Chicago in that leaden late-December tone that flattens the city and makes it look smaller than it is.
She stands there with her jaw tight, and for about a minute she tries to do what she always does—sort the facts, line up the options, find the angle from which the problem has a way out.
There's no way out.
She knows it. She's known it since the moment Erin said Hartman's name, but there's a part of Eleanor that needs to go through the whole process before she can accept something she can't change. It's a flaw she's never once admitted out loud.
She tries to calm down and picks up the glass of water from her desk. She holds it for a second before bringing it to her lips, but before it touches her mouth she tightens her grip and hurls it against the wall.
The sound of shattering glass fills the office for one second, and then everything goes quiet again.
Eleanor stares at the pieces on the floor with an expression no one in the world has ever seen on her face, because when Eleanor Montgomery loses control, she does it alone, always alone, because vulnerability is a luxury she can't afford anywhere there are witnesses.
She picks up the phone on her desk and calls her mother.
"Mom."
"Sweetheart, I'm so glad you called. Are you on your way?"
Eleanor closes her eyes for a second.
"I can't make it tonight, Mom." The words catch in her throat, but she holds herself together. "I've got a party event, it's mandatory, and I tried to get out of it, but I couldn't."
Carol's silence is the quiet answer Eleanor already knows by heart.
"Oh."
"I know." Eleanor's voice is perfectly steady. "Merry Christmas, Mom. Give Richard a kiss for me. And tell—" she pauses for just a second, so brief that in any other conversation it would mean nothing. "Tell everyone I'm sorry."
"Will you come for New Year's?"
"I'll try."
"Eleanor."
"I'll try, Mom. I love you."
She hangs up and stares at the phone in her hand for a moment that lasts longer than it should. Then she sets it on the desk, calls Erin to tell her to confirm her attendance at tonight's event, and asks someone to sweep up the broken glass before her next meeting.
The event is a kind of torture that lasts four hours, during which Eleanor shakes hands, gives a short speech, smiles for photos, and speaks with Hartman for exactly seven minutes with that cold cordiality that exists between two people who know perfectly well what they are to each other and have decided, by tacit mutual agreement, to keep up appearances in public.
Hartman tells her it's a pleasure, that he'd been looking forward to seeing her, that he has a great deal to learn from her career.
Eleanor tells him likewise, that his experience on the committee is an asset to the party. They both smile. They both lie.
When the car picks her up at quarter to midnight, Eleanor slides into the backseat, takes off her shoes, and stares at the ceiling of the car with her eyes open the whole ride.
When she gets home, Daniel is in the living room with his laptop and his bourbon; Eleanor doesn't stop to say hello.
She passes the doorway, goes upstairs to the bedroom, changes in silence, and comes back down barefoot to the library.
She settles into her usual armchair with her legs tucked under her and doesn't reach for a book.
She sits in the dark for a moment before switching on the floor lamp in the corner, that low warm light that changes the texture of the air in the room.
The floor-to-ceiling shelves throw long shadows.
All those spines lined up in rows that are Abigail's without Abigail knowing it, books Eleanor bought at bookstores and secondhand markets because at some absurd, unconfessable point in her adult life she decided that having them was a way of having her close.
Normally she'll let herself open one, flip through it, even read a few pages, but tonight she doesn't open any.
Tonight she sits still and listens to the silence of her own house and thinks about Pittsburgh, about Carol's kitchen, about the lights on the tree Richard puts up every year in the living room with an exaggerated solemnity that makes everyone laugh, about the long table and the noise of family and the holiday wine that always tastes better than any other day.
She thinks about every Christmas she's spent in that house since she was sixteen, and about how each one of them, without exception, had a moment that had nothing to do with the turkey or the gifts or Carol or Richard.
She thinks about Abigail tonight in Pittsburgh, in that house, without her.
It isn't only the body she misses, though that's part of it too, of course it is; twenty years of habit build a physical need, and tonight it shows up as a tightness in her chest that Eleanor doesn't quite know where to put.
It's something more. It's the way Abigail makes everything around her brighter.
It's knowing she's there, even when they're not looking at each other, like a steady current between the two of them that exists no matter what they do or don't do, that exists when they snap at each other over Christmas dinner, when they fuck in the room at the far end of the hall, and when they ignore each other for hours in the yard, that exists always, that has existed for twenty years, and that tonight isn't there because Eleanor is in Chicago, Abigail is in Pittsburgh, and there's nothing to be done about it.
"Damn it," Eleanor whispers when she feels her eyes sting and can't stop it.
Eleanor knows things have been shifting for a while now.
She's spent twenty years convincing herself they have it under control.
That these are encounters, habits, a manageable addiction that doesn't interfere with anything because it's perfectly compartmentalized.
Congresswoman Montgomery on one side. The thing with Abigail on the other.
Two separate worlds that never touch, that coexist without contaminating each other—and tonight, alone in her library with Pittsburgh several hours away by plane, Eleanor Montgomery is starting to wonder if any of that's true.
Pittsburgh. The same night.
Carol announces it in the kitchen while she finishes getting dinner ready, her voice calm, trying to make bad news sound as ordinary as possible.
"Eleanor can't make it. She called me—something about a political event she couldn't miss." She makes a small gesture with her hand. "You all know how her work is."
Richard nods with the fond resignation he brings to anything involving his stepdaughter. Marcus says what a shame, he'd been looking forward to seeing her, and Abigail says nothing.
She's standing by the counter with a glass of wine in her hand, and when Carol makes the announcement, nothing in her face changes, because Abigail has spent her whole life learning to control every reaction her body has.
She nods slightly, takes a sip of wine, and asks if anyone needs help with anything.
"Set the table, if you want," Carol says, and holds her gaze a second longer than necessary before turning back to the stove.
Dinner is pleasant. The family has a tradition of eating together starting on the twenty-third and saying their goodbyes on the twenty-fifth, after opening gifts and having the big meal.
Richard is in a good mood, and the wine has made him laugh more than usual.
Marcus is going on about some Arabian horses he owns, which has most of the table genuinely interested, and the cousins who came this year are easy company, no complications. The dinner is perfectly pleasant.
Abigail stays quiet, eating without tasting anything.
She realizes she's somewhere else, and she notices it by the second course, because she couldn't say with any certainty what she's eaten in the last twenty minutes.
She's there, she participates a little, says the right things at the right moments, laughs when someone says something that's apparently funny, and at the same time there's a part of her that's completely absent, staring into the middle distance in a way that makes no sense, because what she wants isn't here.
The seat where Eleanor should be has been empty for two hours.
Not a literal seat—Eleanor doesn't even have an assigned place at Carol's table; it doesn't work like that.
It's that Abigail has spent two decades walking into any room where Eleanor is and immediately locking onto her presence, without looking for it, without deciding to, like an automatic response that fires before the brain gets involved.
Tonight her brain finds nothing, and the result is a kind of constant static that Abigail doesn't quite know how to turn off.
"You okay?" Marcus asks, low, during a moment when the conversation around them has gotten louder.
"Yeah," Abigail says. "Just tired."
Marcus nods and squeezes her hand on the table, and Abigail lets him, because it's Christmas and she doesn't have the energy for anything beyond getting through the night.
After dinner, when most people have moved to the living room and Carol is in the kitchen making tea, Abigail steps out into the backyard on the pretext that she wants to feel the cold night air.
Nobody goes outside voluntarily at twenty-three degrees, but Carol doesn't say anything, and Abigail grabs her coat from the rack and goes out.
It's genuinely cold, but she doesn't feel it, and her mind drifts to the figure she can see perfectly clearly in her head.
She thinks about Eleanor in Chicago tonight, and the image that comes to her isn't Congresswoman Montgomery at a political event; she knows that image from newspapers and television, and it's a public one that doesn't belong to her.
In her head, Eleanor is barefoot somewhere in her house, wearing the expression she only has when no one's watching.
Eleanor, who's spent twenty years being the most present person in Abigail's life while almost never really being there.
Abigail rests her elbows on her knees and stares at the frost on the ground.
She's spent twenty years being very careful about the words she uses to think about this.
It's not love—that word doesn't get in. It's not need—that one doesn't either, because need implies a dependence Abigail Lawson doesn't have on anyone.
It's a habit. It's chemistry. It's the logical result of years of shared history and a body that's learned to respond to one specific other body.
That's all, something a smart person can manage and keep in its place without letting it interfere with anything.
That's what she's always told herself. But there's something more than withdrawal in what she's feeling right now, and Abigail is too smart and too honest in the dark of her own head not to recognize it. It's the absence itself. The fact that Eleanor isn't here.
The back door opens.
"Abigail," Carol says, a shawl in her arms. "It's cold."
"I'm coming in."
Carol doesn't leave. She walks over to the bench and sits down beside her without saying anything for a moment. She drapes the shawl over Abigail's shoulders.
"I know you miss her," Carol says. She states it, doesn't ask.
Abigail doesn't answer right away.
"That's not true."
Carol nods slowly and doesn't argue.
"Of course," she says, and turns to look at her.
They sit in silence for a moment while the string lights flicker gently in the wind.
"Your dad got cider," Carol says, standing up. "Come in whenever you're ready."
She leaves her alone, and Abigail stays on the bench another five minutes with Carol's shawl around her shoulders and the cold finding every gap the shawl doesn't cover, and she thinks about how she's spent years believing she has this under control.
And she thinks that tonight, for the first time, she isn't so sure.